Our five-step guide to planning for a website redesign

Our guide will make your site more engaging, better looking, and higher converting.

Your website is one of your most important assets. Of course, social media and your content strategy will no doubt contribute to your growth, but a well-designed website can persuade new customers to buy your products and services, and ensure existing ones come back for more.

If you’re thinking about redesigning your company website this year, then fear not. In today’s article, we have put together a five-step website redesign guide that will ensure your new site is more engaging, better looking, and higher converting.

Analyse your website’s performance

If you’re not already using tools such as Google Analytics on your website, make sure you integrate the technology into your existing website as soon as possible. By looking through your analytics and data, you’ll be able to get a lot of valuable information that will help you to make more strategic design choices when launching a new website.

For example, knowing who uses your website, how they get there (from Google or social), what pages they go to when they get there, and how long they stay can all influence design decisions and aspects such as navigation placements and the ‘stickiness’ of your site.

Developing a new website can be time-consuming, costly and stressful, so understanding the changes that you need to make in order to increase conversions and sales makes sense.

Decide on your objectives

It’s easy to fall into the trap of designing a new website, simply because your old one has been live for a couple of years and you’re ready for a refresh. But spending hundreds, or thousands, of pounds on a new website that doesn’t make a difference to your bottom line is bad business.

Before you speak with a web developer, start by identifying your business goals so that your site works for you and delivers a return on investment. Without doing so, you’ll be wasting money.

For example, if you want to increase the visibility of your brand and reach a wider audience, then search engine optimisation should be the primary focus of your new website. That could mean making changes to the structure of your website to make it easier to find on Google, and incorporating more written content into your pages, as long-form content performs better.

You might want your new website to be a hub for business information, whether that’s articles, documents, newsletters, video content or white papers. Therefore, your web developer will likely focus on developing a content management system that’s tailored to your needs and objectives.

Whilst it’s fine to go to a developer with no idea of the type of site you’d like to create, designing a new site blindly without thinking about your goals and objectives could be more expensive in the long-run.

Look at competitors and industry trends

It can be tempting to try to reinvent the wheel when designing a new website for your business, but more often than not, sticking to what works makes sense. Your web developer will no doubt have their own ideas for your new website, but you should conduct your own research to see what your competitors are doing, and look at the wider industry trends for more inspiration.

You can use tools such as Ahrefs to see where your website ranks compared to competitors, Buzzsumo to compare your authority and social media traffic, and Google Forms to create a questionnaire or survey to collect feedback from your website’s existing users. After all, your target audience knows better than anyone else, so getting them involved is a sensible idea.

Further afield, websites such as Webflow and Creative Bloq post great content on the latest web design trends. Webflow, for example, predicts that illustrations and animations will continue to grow in popularity, whilst Creative Bloq expects to see more varied colour schemes, unusual typography combinations and more integration with artificial intelligence tools such as chatbots.

By conducting your own primary research before you speak with a web developer, you’ll be able to enter a meeting with a clear idea of the type of website you’d like them to create, saving time and ensuring you get the right result. From there, your developer can give their own suggestions and you can engage in collaborative web development, a win-win for both parties.

Think about your branding

In the world of digital marketing, consistency is key. The Rule of 7 argues consumers need to be exposed to the same marketing message seven times before it sinks in, so if your branding is inconsistent across your website, on social media and in your offline marketing, then it will take longer for potential customers to remember your name and consider you when buying.

In our recent post on maintaining a consistent brand online, we suggested that you start with your website. As the ‘shopfront of your business’, you should work to develop a site that serves as the foundation for your entire marketing strategy.

If you’re launching a website for a brand new business, then you have free reign on your brand, but for established businesses, it’s important to be sympathetic to your existing branding whilst pushing your site forward with new graphics and interactive content to make yourself stand out.

Look at your current image, and decide which aspects you’d like to carry forward into a new site. That might include your colour scheme and logo, but it could mean saying goodbye to some of your outdated assets and introducing new branding to take your business to the next level.

Choose a web development company

The final step to redesigning your website is choosing the right web developers for the job. It makes sense to speak to several agencies before you make a firm decision, as developers’ skills and specialisms can vary from company to company. Indeed, working with a company that specialises in your niche may prove to be a more effective solution, as they’ll already have an understanding of your niche and will likely have worked with your competitors in the past.

You should be clear on your budget, and determine how much you’re willing to spend. From there, you can inquire about pricing, and ask about additional fees and charges for website maintenance, hosting, and changes. Once you’ve found a company, relayed your requirements and set a deadline for your project, it’s time to leave the experts to get to work on your new site!